3 poems by Eithne Lannon

Eithne Lannon is a poet and native of Dublin. In her writing she embraces the natural world as a medium to express various dimensions of human experience. Online in Ireland, the UK, US and Canada, she’s had work published with Headstuff, Bare Hands, Sheila-na-Gig, and BeZine. She’s been included in publications such as The Ogham Stone, Boyne Berries, Skylight 47 and FLARE.

dropping, ever dropping, into the quiet…………..whispering, the unspeakable tenderness.

Moon

Take the river’s curl, the ocean’s wave,
the never ending trees, the sway of a meadow,
the roll of the sun, the scattered stepping stars,

and take last month’s silver bud of moon
now come full to the sky, her mouth is wide and open,
white lips brimming with a soft wet light,

month by month, she gives her widening
emptiness to the earth, holds the planet in her orbit,
washes ocean after ocean over sand:

I stretch out my arms and reach for her,
hold hands with her rhythm, climb into her open
wound, my blood is lapping at her perpetual pull,

I sleep in the mantle of her tidal pulse, slip
the ring of her light onto my finger. At the last hour
of fullness, I wade inside her alluvial silt,

feel desire awash in my gut. Lost inside
her wholeness, carved into her darkening spine,
I am swallowed into goddess light.

Ritual

He washed the body she told me,
their first-born, a ritual cleansing
only he could do.

I thought of him then
in his careful meticulous way,
imagined him dip, in the warm water basin,
a soft cloth, so tenderly squeezed to damp,
lightly pressed to her pallid skin,
his quiet touch on her pale freckled face;
her eyelashes curled,
the slope of her nose,
the blue famished lips,
down to her white stilled breast,
the dipped hollow beneath her arms,
her ashen finger tips.

Washing
with a slow raw devotion,
her silent unlived body,
his final act of love.

[1] The term ‘Thin Places’ comes from pre-Christian Celtic culture. It refers to places where it was believed the physical and non-physical worlds meet.